


sacred herbs: a hannibal advent

by thebeespatella



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abuse of Dante's Inferno, Alternate Universe - Regency, Blow Jobs, Divorce, F/F, Gender or Sex Swap, Hannibal Rising References, M/M, Making Out, Recreational Drug Use, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:21:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21677410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/thebeespatella
Summary: Advent fics 2019.
Relationships: Alana Bloom/Margot Verger, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 77
Kudos: 91
Collections: 2019 Advent Ficlet Challenge





	1. Snowflake

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt list taken from [these advent prompts.](https://missdaviswrites.tumblr.com/post/189396021633/2019-advent-ficlet-challenge/amp) I'm not going in order, but I will try to get them all done.
> 
> This is a new adventure for me, let's see if I can see it through. Apologies in advance for typos, editing WHOMST, run like a freak blizzard through the roils of self-applied arbitrary pressure!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana/Margot, in hiding.

“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.” - Matthew 2:14

When she wakes up, the world is white. It’s quiet in the way of early mornings, a day untouched by itself just yet. The air smells of cold and the animal-warm of the eiderdown comforter. The space next to her is still warm with the imprint of Margot’s body, and she seeks it out with her hand. Heat-seeking, her fingers and her mind. If she tilts her head up she can see it—white as far as she can see. It hurts her neck to try look any further. She gives up and swings her legs over the side of the bed. Her hip twinges. It’s always worse in the cold. She thinks about putting on her slippers, but leaves them pigeon-toed and forlorn by the bedside table, and flexes her bare feet on the hardwood to pad over to look outside. The bones in her feet rolling over the floor. Sometimes she wants to feel closer to her bones. 

When she gets to the window, she looks down to see Margot bundled down at the front of the house, shoveling snow out of the space that passes for their driveway; a long stretch of road in a straight half-mile down to the edge of the property and the electrified fence. If she presses closer to the bullet-proof double-glazed glass, she can hear the metronomic scrape of the shovel meeting the snow and then the asphalt underneath. Shoveling snow like she’d once shoveled hay. Margot had never been a morning person, before, rolling around in the big bed and dawdling, kiss-drunk and touch-heavy, in her closet to find the arrangements tuned to her whims each day. Now they were both set by a different clock—and on cue, she hears the click of the door on the other side of the hall. Their windows are thick but their walls are thin. 

She follows the small footsteps downstairs, looking at the space where a tree might go in the corner of the cream and blue-trimmed living room. Holiday. They don’t get one; living on the end of the tether of Hannibal’s fool’s gold. They litter the rest of Morgan’s life with presents, but somehow, having to leave a stack of them, unopened, seems unbearable—that Hannibal’s hands might turn over books and earrings and sweaters—the things they’d picked for each other. He might find some new fold in each of their brains to nestle into like a bear picking a cave to hibernate in for the winter; and Will—Will was always so good with evidence. 

Morgan is sitting in his seat at the breakfast table—the one farthest from the windows and closest to the door. He’s got the fire drill route to the panic room pressed into his little body, same as he knows how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye.’ He’s eating cereal, clink of the metal against the china. He doesn’t slurp. Table manners pressed into him, too. “Good morning,” she says. 

“Morning, Mama,” he says, smiling at her gap-toothed and turning his face up for a kiss on the cheek. He has Alana’s eyes and Mason’s distinct plush mouth. Well. Not his very distinct mouth, from after—some things are too terrible to pass on through anything but time and experience, so he doesn’t quite have Alana’s eyes either. She sits down and pours herself some cereal, a local crunchy-hippie brand that Margot picks out at the store with a furrowed brow over the ingredient list. Checking for preservatives; those things’ll kill you. It’s the food that doesn’t need a list that sometimes feels the most dangerous for both of them. 

She pours herself milk. She watches Margot scrape a path for them outside. Wide enough for escape. Wide enough for survival. “How did you sleep?” she asks Morgan. 

“Fine,” he mumbles though a mouthful. They’ll have to work on that. “Can we go outside, after? I want to make a snowman. And have a snowball fight. And snow angels.”

Snow angels. Last time she’d looked up like that from the ground had been flat on her back on the cold pavement outside Hannibal’s home. Collateral damage staring straight into the vertigo pummel of the rain; just waiting for Will to drape his jacket over her and then for Hannibal to take it away. When Morgan turns eighteen, Alana thinks—that’ll be done. She’ll run the clock out if it kills her. 

“Maybe later, baby,” she says. “When Mom comes back in.”

“I’m done,” he announces, and carries his empty bowl and spoon to the sink. Waste not, want not. 

“Come here,” she says, and he comes back, warm and affectionate, sticky-fingered and sure-footed. 

She settles him on her lap to watch Margot through the wide windows—a luxury afforded them by the bodyguards making their rounds, and the electric fence, and their sacrifice. Hers and theirs. More yours than mine. She sits and pets at his band-aid knees through the flannel of his pajamas. Cereal on her tongue and love on her lap. Snow angels. The human body just warm enough to melt miracles into water. 

Margot plunges the shovel into a snowdrift like a knife and waves at them through the window. Her cheeks are fluorescent with exertion, and her smile is big and bright. “Come outside!” Through the glass. No holes here—Alana can’t hear her. She beckons them with a mittened hand, hair escaping her hat to tendril against the sweat on her face. 

Alana presses her cheek to Morgan’s soft no-tears-clean hair, feeling the solid curve of the skull underneath. Close to the bone. He’s been spun by each of them together, by their clouds and their winds and how they’d collided together. Unique crystal structure drifting down from accidents of the weather. He wriggles outside the clutch of her body.

“I want to go out,” he says. 

“Sure. You go out and stay with Mom. And bundle up,” she calls after his scamper pitter-pattering back up the stairs. “It’ll be cold out there.”


	2. Exhaustion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, blowjobs and feelings. Mostly feelings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the sappiest fucking thing I've ever written in my LIFE, make the yuletide gay I guess

In retrospect, it should have seemed inevitable, but the shapes of desire have always been, to him, like walking through the fog—difficult to apprehend until they’re before you in all their stark glory. Nonetheless, he knows the look, the shape, the clarity of them, and besides—it would be difficult to avoid the way Hannibal traces the bones in his wrist sometimes, passes him in their galley kitchen with a warm hand pressed to the small of his back. Too close; too close to be anything else, too close for comfort. So he takes it on himself, like everything else these days, the wrung-out rag of having to parse and be parsed, and leans back into the touch one day. Leans back, rests his head onto the cliffside of Hannibal’s shoulder and bares his throat. Looks him in the eyes and says, “So, are we fucking, or what?”

Hannibal tilts a smile at him, presses his hand more firmly into his spine. “Is that what you want?”

Will sighs and closes his eyes. Having to make your own shapes out of fog is exhausting, and the forward thrust of them can melt down so quickly in Hannibal’s presence to be soldered onto something new, so instead he turns around and hauls Hannibal in by the front of his shirt for a kiss. It’s dry and a little graceless, too fast, too hard, but then Hannibal runs his hands down Will’s sides like he’s calming an animal and that’s familiar territory, isn’t it, and Will can relax into it. 

He lets his arms twine about Hannibal’s neck, lets his mouth part with the query of Hannibal’s tongue. It can be this. It can be just this; the easy slide of their mouths together, the grip of Hannibal’s fingers on his waist. This can be the shape this takes, even if he’d wanted—the fog dissipates, it doesn’t matter. They’re making out in their little kitchen and it doesn’t matter. The urgency of Hannibal’s own desire—the way his hands travel down to hook into Will’s waistband, and bring them closer—Will had thought they might be close enough—closer still, roving to palm at Will’s ass and grind their hips together. It’s a shocking touch, his fingers clenching into the sit-spots, Will has to take a sip of air when he pushes back into it. 

“You want this,” he says.

“Of course,” Hannibal says. _Of course, of course._ Will has been bemused, politely and less politely at turns, at the attention he gets all his life and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop now, but some things start being real if you lean into them enough. He’d leaned in enough when he’d showed up on Hannibal’s doorstep, brand-new herringbone over his arm and said, “I’d like to resume my therapy.” But he’d thought it was about his mind; their minds, together. Being put back into his body, the heavy slump of physicality. It’s not bad. It’s not anything. There are no morals to the inescapable. 

Hannibal’s mouth is heady and hot against his, so he goes back to that. When people talk about losing themselves they don’t know what they mean. Not like he knows. 

“Bedroom?” Hannibal says. 

Of course, on course. “Yes.”

Hannibal takes him by the hand. Will looks down at it. “I know where it is,” he says, but doesn’t take his hand back. “Let’s use yours.” It’ll be better to keep it in one place. They walk the hallway together, still linked in the dark. 

As soon as they’re inside, Will pushes Hannibal against the closed door—who’s going to interrupt them?—and gets his hands to unbuttoning. Sometimes Hannibal just seems like a mile of buttons needing undoing. 

“Impatient,” Hannibal says. 

“Sure,” Will says. “Kept up the wait long enough. Doesn’t do to postpone the inevitable.”

“Inevitable.” Hannibal tastes the word like he does wine, rolling around in his mouth. Will wonders if he’s going to spit that out, too. “You felt it was inevitable.” 

“Of course it is,” Will says. “You’re not as unpredictable as you like to think.”

“Certainly less predictable than yourself,” Hannibal says, and Will pulls off his shirt, then goes for his own. “Wait.” 

“For _what_ ,” Will says, hands still at his own buttons. 

“I would like to undress you.”

“Sure.” Will lets his hands drop to his sides. Hannibal thinks he has gifts; makes sense you’d want to unwrap the ones you could. Hannibal’s tried hard enough with the ones you couldn’t; therapy, then a bone saw, and now this—thumb tracing over his collarbone, dragging down the line of the skin as he moves; methodical, deliberate. 

“Beautiful,” Hannibal says when he’s finished, shirt dropping to the floor. Will doesn’t know what to do with this. He’s never known what to do with this moment, standing with his shirt off and watching other people watch. But Hannibal presses his fingers into his scars first, before drifting to other skin. This is better. This is better than before. You have to rise slowly from the seafloor otherwise you’ll get the bends. 

“Might as well do the rest,” Will says, but is still taken aback when Hannibal drops to his knees to unsnap his belt buckle and mouth at the scar on his belly. Their shared history of hurt; the topography of their knives and their hands and the flat blunt sea. Hannibal pulls Will’s pants down and lets them pool at his feet to step out of, resting his head on Will’s hip before he takes him in his mouth. Will has a wild thought about teeth. He keeps it to himself, moving, instead, his hand to curl in Hannibal’s hair. He’s barely hard but Hannibal works his mouth on his cock anyway, sliding down wet, tongue flicking over the head and looking up at him all the time. “Feels good,” he says, and it does. 

Will closes his eyes against the stark image of Hannibal’s eyes boring up and in, his mouth stretched over his cock. It’s an early winter afternoon and the way the albino light strikes the angles on Hannibal’s face—he looks too much like he does when he’s drawing: focused, relaxed. Will mourns the connection he’s made. He won’t be able to unstick the pages from each other again. 

“Bed?” he says when Hannibal pulls off for air. They make the short walk and Will lays down back into the pillows. Desire is easy. Desire is reflexive. Will thinks of a hooker he’d booked for solicitation back as a beat cop, both of them leaning against the engine-rumble hot hood of his car as he wrote her up. “I can be anything you want,” she’d said, vowels long around the lipstick-stain on her cigarette butt. “What do you want?” Well, at least one of us is getting paid, he thinks, then shoves back the bitterness in a panic in case it shows on his face. “C’mere,” he says instead. “Take your pants off.”

“Whatever you want,” Hannibal says, and Will feels a scream take its old perch, rustling its wings in his throat.

“For once.” It slips, terrible and unbidden, and Hannibal casts a look at him, and Will smiles to ease the sharp shale-cut of the words. The pants hit the floor and Will pulls him in, back to the rhythm of touch and breathing. Back into the body. They kiss, slowly, entwining, and he’s surprised—he’d thought Hannibal might tear at him, might bend him over and take. But this is good, too, fingers grasping at the nape of his neck and his elbow, chests pressed together. 

“I had never thought I might one day also have this,” Hannibal murmurs into his skin. 

“What?” 

“That you might also give me this. I would have been content. Although, I must admit to fantasizing a great deal.”

Will has to sit up, dislodging Hannibal from atop him. He’s wearing that look, that pre-smile jut of his lip, and Will can only blink. “What did you say to me?” It feels—too hot, burning like fever. Anger can feel like shame. Usually it’s in the aftermath; sitting hot here together and sharing the bath of his skin feels like a body-wide itch. 

Hannibal looks gratifyingly confused. “I admit, it is not—perhaps not the most opportune time for this conversation…”

“But you—this. Also? Also _what_? It’s just sex, Hannibal, relax. I’m not going to ask you to—“

“Ask?” Hannibal’s face looks like someone’s unplugged him. Too still, too quiet. “Ask me?”

“I’m just saying, you don’t have to—you don’t have to. We can still…we can have sex. You don’t have to.”

“Have to.”

“Repeating what I just said isn’t actually an answer,” Will snaps, and draws his legs up to look at his knees instead of at Hannibal, sitting beside him and watching with his fish-hook gaze. 

“Will,” he says. “We seem to be operating under different assumptions.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have to assume so much if you would just say what you mean. Not everything has to be dressed up black-tie.”

There is a long silence. Maybe Hannibal is struggling to say something that isn’t a goddamn metaphor. Maybe he’s thinking about the quickest way to snap Will’s neck. He’ll never know. He’ll never know, and so had to build his own physics for this universe, and for Hannibal to resent him for it, to criticize him for it—

“I thought it was clear,” Hannibal says. “I was mistaken. I thought it was obvious that this—sharing this with you could only be an extension of everything else we share. I cannot touch you lightly. It is too graven with everything else. I find myself curious”—Will has to snort at this—“how you could not see.” He doesn’t reach out to touch Will here, and he appreciates it. “It is written into everything I do.”

“Maybe I’m just fucking illiterate,” he says. It snaps out like a banner in the wind, like like a fist into a palm, and it feels good. It feels good to let the bird fly, this is the scream he gets: honesty. 

“Or perhaps this is a language you have yet to learn,” Hannibal says. “That you can be touched with meaning.” 

Another silence. 

“Will, look at me,” he says. “Look at me and begin to learn.”

Will feels his head turn although he hadn’t asked it to. Concession. He looks at Hannibal, in a way that he hasn’t let himself lately, because it feels like—it feels like cheating, sometimes, in narrow moments where he wants to tally up everything they’ve done to each other. 

What he sees splits him open. Hannibal doesn’t look any different than he had before, haloed in winter sun—but suddenly, he understands. What his eyes are picking up that they hadn’t seen before, or perhaps without the barrier of his own shape in the fog—he doesn’t know. He’s never known, really, how it worked—but sometimes gists will have to do when they’re inside you. Their blood is so close to the skin, and a warm rise, like light, like pain, floods their chest to clutch at the inside of the esophagus, scrabbling to be set free, gouging new marks, up, up, up, until the world of one body is not enough. It’s violent. It’s lovely. It’s theirs.

Will closes his eyes with it. If he looks any longer he will burn from the inside out, a lightning strike in a hollow tree. “How,” he manages, low and inadequate. 

“Very easily,” Hannibal says. “Through the revelatory experience of seeing you each day.”

“God.” Will lets out a laugh. It comes out half-choked. “I had no idea. You really.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. “Of course.”

 _Of course, of course._

“I thought it was inconvenient,” he says. 

“Inconvenience doesn’t stop the truth,” Hannibal says. “She is a relentless mistress.”

Will smiles, and it feels safe to open his eyes. “You seeing her behind my back?”

“In your back,” Hannibal says, and does reach out a hand to trace a shoulder blade. It feels like branding, and Will sucks in a breath. “In your hands.”

Will catches his hand before he can take it back. “I’m not always going to be certain. Takes time to learn a new language; fluency can take years.”

“We cannot accept gifts we do not think we deserve.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to say something.” Will pulls him closer, so their legs tangle together on the light-bleached sheets. “Will you keep giving me gifts, even if I won’t always know how to accept them with grace?”

“As long as I have the strength to give them.” Hannibal pets a hand through his hair and rubs his thumb into the space behind his ear. It feels less like gentling an animal and more like caressing a person.

“Then come here,” Will says, “I believe you said something about new tongues.” And he pulls them down, together, again.


	3. Bah humbug

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, mild crack, pretty fluffy, feat. an ungodly inflatable Santa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pure nonsense, hope you enjoy

The thing about living incognito as a pair of cannibalistic serial killers is really the incognito bit. Unfortunately, nobody can know about your little gourmet murder habit, so your neighbors remain relentlessly and cheerfully unmoved by any amount of glaring when they erect a giant inflatable Santa on their front lawn and half of yours. 

“It’s over the property line,” Will says.

“Oh, have a little Christmas spirit,” Mr. Nussbaum says. 

“Keep your Christmas spirit to yourself,” Will snaps, and turns on his heel and stalks back to the house. “Hannibal,” he calls, shutting the door. “He won’t move it.”

“What did he say?”

“To have a little Christmas spirit. And come out of the kitchen, this yelling is ridiculous.”

Hannibal emerges, drying his hands on a dish towel. His apron is covered in flour, and some has caught on his sweater and on his face, too, in cloudy smudges. “Perhaps you could leave Mr. Nussbaum to his decorating proclivities.”

“It doesn’t bother you? Look at it, it’s hideous.”

“I, too, must bear the enormous weight of seeing it every day, Will. I live here.”

“Look at its face. It looks like Christmas threw up via Lovecraft.”

“Evocative as always, darling.” 

“Seriously, it doesn’t bother you.”

Hannibal lifts his shoulder in a shrug. “Of course,” he says. “But not enough to make such a fuss.” 

“Right,” Will says. “Right, your fusses generally involve more gutting.” And he goes to fume in the back room, tinkering with lures, as the smell of gingerbread fills the house. 

Hannibal knocks on the door some time later. “Are you finished sulking?”

“Are you finished being patronizing?”

“Dinner’s on the table.”

On one hand, it had been a pretty spectacular sulk. On the other, his stomach is grumbling at him. He walks back out to the kitchen and takes a seat. 

“Foie gras terrine,” Hannibal announces, setting their plates down. 

“No cloche? Slipping, Hannibal.”

Hannibal ignores him, because apparently being so evolved that eating other people isn’t cannibalism also means you don’t rise to bait. He pours them both wine and sits. They eat in silence, until Will moves to stroke his fingers along Hannibal’s pulse in his wrist. 

“This is very good.”

“Thank you, Will.” 

“I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

“I’m happy to remind you.”

Will pushes a fingertip past the cuff of Hannibal’s sweater. “You’re always very good at reminding me. When I’m hungry. And you always know what I’m hungry for.” Hannibal takes a sip of his wine but leaves his wrist under Will’s fingers. “It’s been a while.”

“We just moved in,” Hannibal says. “We’ve both been busy.”

“It’s been _weeks_ , Hannibal.” 

“Surely not that long. Only two nights ago—“

“Not that, Hannibal, the other thing.”

“Of course.” Hannibal turns to look at him, turns his hand palm up. 

“Embracing my true nature—I didn’t know it would be so relentless, so keen. I didn’t realize that my appetite would need such immediate sating—“

“Will.” Hannibal takes his wrist back. “We’re not going to kill Mr. Nussbaum.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re actually very boring?”

“It’s too risky. He is our immediate neighbor.”

“Just—so boring. Excruciating.” 

Hannibal begins to clear their plates. 

“Live a little!” he calls after Hannibal, ignoring that it sounds a little like pleading. 

In hindsight, he could have been a little more subtle about it. But that night, Hannibal fast asleep on the other side of the bed, Will can only stare at the shadowed ceiling and work over the Intractable Santa Problem. He’d tried to be reasonable. He’d really done his best, but the thing just bobbed and swayed, leering into the street like an oversized child molester. Really, something had to be done, and if Hannibal wasn’t going to help him—well. They couldn’t share everything. He wriggles out from under the duvet and pads towards the door. 

“Where are you going?”

“Bathroom,” he says. “Go back to sleep.” 

He creeps back to the workroom and stubs his toe something awful on the corner of the desk before finding his prize. He takes his knife and walks over to the Nussbaum house.

&

Will feels quite chipper the next morning, despite his interrupted sleep, when he can turn to look at Hannibal in the unobstructed light of their bedroom, reaching out to trace the curve of the scar on his cheekbone in the glazed-over winter sunlight. 

“Morning,” he says.

“Will,” Hannibal says. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” 

“I see.” Hannibal turns into the weight of his hand to press a kiss into his palm. “I thought we might go to the market today.”

“Sure. But first, can I interest you in a little of the other thing?” 

“We discussed this last night, the risk—“

“No, the _other thing_ , God, Hannibal.”

“You really must learn to be more specific,” Hannibal says, rolling over to cage him in his arms, and they lose themselves in each other for a while, light and easy. 

The mood only lasts as long as it takes for them to step outside the house. Hannibal doesn’t disentangle his fingers from Will’s but he does look at him with reproach. “Will.”

“What.”

“You said you didn’t do anything.”

“I tripped.”

“Tripped.”

“I went out to look at it, and I tripped. With the business end of a knife.”

“You’re ever so clumsy, darling.”

“It’s very unfortunate.”

When they’ve made sure all the canvas tote bags are accounted for and settled into the car, Will turns to him. “Oh, my God. You’re disappointed.”

“Whatever do you—“

“You’re disappointed that I didn’t kill him. That all I did was give his Santa a little poke with the knife and then go back to bed.”

“I am nothing of the sort, Will. And that must’ve been some little poke.”

“That’s not what you said this morning.” 

“Put on your seatbelt.”

Will thinks about not doing it then remembers that Ted Bundy had been pulled over for having his headlights off and buckles in. 

The market always gets Hannibal in a good mood. What Will wouldn’t give to get that excited over chives. They walk between stalls piled high with vibrant winter squash, mounds of parsnips and green growing things. He finds himself relaxing into the bracing winter air, clipping gently at his nose with clever fingers, and even accedes to a sample cup of hot apple cider while Hannibal undergoes an inspection of the fruit that can only indicate sexual interest. It’s just too bad he’d married an apple fucker, Will muses, and then he turns and sees something that makes him choke on his drink. 

He grabs Hannibal by the arm and steers him away from a debate on the properties of McIntoshes versus Pink Ladies that was getting too lively to be decent in any case. “I’m sure that was a riveting conversation,” he says. “But there’s an emergency.”

“Will, are you all right—“

“It’s Mr. Nussbaum,” he says.

“And?”

“I killed his Santa!”

He hauls Hannibal into the nearest alley and shoves him behind a dumpster before crouching down himself. 

“Will, if you bruised the chard—“

“Shut up or he’ll see you,” Will hisses. 

“Not likely, as we are still behind a fetid dumpster.”

“And this is where we’ll stay until I’m sure he’s gone.”

“What a vantage point,” Hannibal says. “I’m so glad all that law enforcement training was not wasted on you.” 

Will settles for flicking him on the ear and peers out. “Hannibal, we’re going to have to move.”

“Yes, this is not where I—“

“No, I mean, from here. Forever. We’re going to have to pack up and move elsewhere.”

Hannibal makes his little moue of disapproval. “But I just got the kitchen set up.”

“You’re unbearable, you know that, right.”

“You remind me lovingly at least four times a day.”

“Unbearable.”

“That’s two.” 

“It didn’t take you that long to set up the kitchen.”

“Weeks, Will. It will take more than a bout of Santa-related violence to dislodge us from our new home.”

“He knows it was me.”

“Are you feeling guilty about your impulses again, Will? I thought we’d left that long ago. Somewhere in Maryland, wasn’t it? Perhaps you remember better than I.”

“I swear to God—“

“Useless.”

“If I’d wanted to know your theological position on stabbing inflatable holiday decorations, I’d have asked, thanks.”

“I am always willing to be generous with you.” A pause. “But even my generosity has its limitations. Get up. This is—irrational.” He hauls Will up by the arm in a bruising grip, then shoves him against the wall. “Are you feeling all right? This fixation is not healthy.”

“Didn’t they take away your MD? When you were convicted of all those crimes?”

Hannibal presses a palm to his forehead. “Well, it’s not the encephalitis. I would have smelled that. Although it’s difficult to smell anything back here except for—“

They both feel it at the same time. The needle-flicker prickle of being watched, and they turn to look at the mouth of the alley. 

It’s Mr. Nussbaum, of course. Will’s life has been all silver spoons and gilded cotton candy, why should the easy train stop now. He could’ve died in the sea, but instead it’s going to be here, on a sunny winter morning, cozied up with Hannibal behind a dumpster. It could be worse, but he really can’t imagine how. 

“Hello!” Hannibal calls, and gives Nussbaum a cheery wave, after which the man leaves at a brisk trot. Will understands. Somehow Hannibal being friendly is one of the most ominous things he does. 

“Now he thinks we fuck behind dumpsters in public!”

“A noble sacrifice on the part of your dignity, Will,” Hannibal says. “As it was so intact before. Come along now. I have a pie to make.”

“A pie?”

“Yes, a conciliatory pie. An apology pie, Will, for your eternal clumsiness.”

Will snorts. “Your 50’s-style housewife skills never fail to impress.” 

The Moue intensifies. “If you insist on clumsiness, I will insist on pies.”

The car ride back is quiet. Will leans to press his forehead against the window, watching his breath make shapes against the glass until they pull into the driveway. 

“Will you be wearing a frilly apron?” he asks as they put the food into the refrigerator. 

“What?”

“When you bring him the pie.”

“You can chop the apples.” 

“Fine.” Will washes his hands, and then the apples when they’re presented to him in a colander. He even skips his regular grouse about it—“What’s the point of buying organic if you have to wash them, Hannibal?”/“Will, please.”—which he considers a success. “How thick should the apple slices be?”

“About a quarter inch, please.” Hannibal is busy over a bowl of flour and—

“Is that the lard? The…special lard.”

Hannibal smiles at him. “Yes. After all,” he says. “The Santa was quite ugly.” 

“I knew you understood me,” Will says, putting down the knife to kiss Hannibal against the counter. 

“Always,” Hannibal says into his mouth. “Now, please, let me work. This recipe is time-sensitive. I wouldn’t want to deprive Mr. Nussbaum the chance for a slice.”


	4. Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, Regency cis-sex-swap AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did minimal research for this because I didn't need to go down an Austen k-hole yet _again_. Also apparently I am letting all of my sappiest Hannigram feelings out this holiday season, it's thrilling. 
> 
> Thanks to [pensee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensee/pseuds/pensee), who helped inspire this fic. Eternally grateful, etc.

On the third visit to the Grahams’, Hannibal determines two things: firstly, that Miss Willow Graham does not seem to like Hannibal very much, which is tolerable, because the young lady doesn’t seem to like very much in any case, and secondly, that Miss Graham will be her wife. The first is a minor obstacle to the achievement of the second, but Hannibal has always been patient. 

She is, however, caught off-guard when Miss Graham puts down her tea decisively ten minutes into the fourth visit and says, “Dr. Lecter. You seem to have a great passion for the study of the natural sciences.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. 

“Then I wonder if you should like to accompany me to the edge of the property. There is a fine cave there filled with an assortment of fish and plants that you might find intriguing.”

“Will,” her mother hisses. “He won’t want—“

“I would be delighted to, Miss Graham.”

“Let me fetch my coat, and I will meet you at the door?”

There is a moderate amount of comforting to be done when Miss Graham leaves the room, her mother absolutely despairing at the state of her daughter. “Dr. Lecter,” she says. “I hope you do not feel obliged—“

“Not at all, Mrs. Graham, I would have declined had it not suited me.”

“You’re a very kind gentleman, to indulge my daughter’s whims.” 

“Well?” Miss Graham pokes her head back into the parlor. 

“Yes, of course. Mrs. Graham,” she says, and bows slightly. 

They head out into the cold. “There cannot be such thriving wildlife out here in the winter,” Hannibal observes. 

“Of course not,” Miss Graham says. “It was simply stifling in there.” 

Hannibal cannot catch her laugh in time, and is gratified to see that Miss Graham is smiling as well.

“Have you had your fill of charming anecdotes about how accomplished I am? Perhaps seen enough samples of my embroidery on handkerchiefs and the like?”

“They are very lovely handkerchiefs,” Hannibal says. “Although perhaps two would have sufficed.” 

“Take my arm; the creek has iced over and can be very slippery here.”

Hannibal takes it. There is surprising strength in that little arm. “Are we going to the cave, then?”

“Yes. It wouldn’t do to lie to Mother, now, would it.” 

“Certainly not.”

They push through the wind, the great sweeping tide of the air over the brackish ribbon-ripple of the grass, the empty boughs of trees standing upright like contorted footmen, fingers spiking upwards into the gray, until they are at the mouth of the cave. 

“Touch nothing,” Miss Graham says. “Leave all as it was when we arrived.”

“Yes, of course.” Hannibal inclines her head and follows Miss Graham until they are both half-shrouded in dark. 

“My father used to take me here, when I was a girl,” Miss Graham says. “We would fish together up the stream and then sit here in the shade to eat, in the summer.” 

“It must have been lovely,” Hannibal says. “You must miss him terribly.”

To her surprise, Miss Graham laughs. “Dr. Lecter. Do you seek to probe the secrets of my mind so early in our courtship? What do you hope to find?”

“I seek nothing but the truth of you, Miss Graham.”

“Call me Will, if we are to be wedded.” 

“…Are we to be wedded? I must confess surprise on my part.” 

“You had a strange satisfaction about you this afternoon. As though you had come to a decision. And you will want to ensure our betrothal once you hear what I have to say.” Will turns her keen gaze on Hannibal, eyes bright in the gloaming of the cave. “I know what you are.” 

“What do you mean?” She must tread carefully now: she has two secrets, one tucked up in bandages around her chest and the other creeping toward the scalpel in her sleeve. 

“No, not the woman bit, I knew that from the first day.” 

“How?”

“You sipped your tea when my mother spoke of losing a child. Overcompensating.” She sounds impatient, of all things.

“This is the evidence upon which you would build such a hypothesis?”

“And you never used the chamber pot behind the screen despite the copious amount of tea forced upon you.” 

“Still, quite weak.”

“Am I wrong? Besides,” Will says. “That is not all. There’s something else.”

Hannibal waits. The scalpel in her palm now. Suspicion travels up her spine, her vertebrae in arpeggio. 

“I am friendly with one of the local constables. Crawford, perhaps you know him. He has been telling me about an odd series of murders down in London. They were timed perfectly with your stay; ending, in fact, the very week that you first showed up for tea. He showed me some of the illustrations.” 

Hannibal takes a step forward. It echoes in the cave, like time lost and then returning. Will takes a step back, finding herself pressed against the wall of the cave, and takes a deep breath. She is exquisite, even now, a curl escaping across her forehead, the peony bloom of her mouth. Hannibal will mourn this creature; mourn that she will have to leave the corpse here. Perhaps only a morsel or two to sustain her, the kidneys, perhaps—a pity; there was a fine mind behind those eyes, those teeth that caged so much behind them. The slip of her tongue as she wets her lips. 

“Don’t you want to hear what I thought of them?” Will whispers into the air between them. She tilts her head, exposing the line of her throat from beneath her coat collar. Perhaps Hannibal had been mistaken; perhaps she was stupid, not to see the predator’s stalk before her, the unmistakable look of hunt that is undoubtedly masking Hannibal’s face. She can feel it now, hot, settling into her bones and her skin. “I thought they were beautiful,” Will says. 

Hannibal stops, the words in her chest as though she had swallowed her own scalpel. “You deduced that I am a woman from a teacup and a chamber pot,” she says, after a long silence. “How would you guarantee this hypothesis as well?”

“I have—a strange gift,” Will says, looking away into the depths of the cave. Perhaps she, too, can hear time bouncing back, reloading the musket along with each word she speaks. “I can…see, sometimes. The way human emotions are arrayed, even if they are unspoken. I cannot always explain. Something in your bearing, perhaps. Or the flash of that scalpel in your sleeve. The cuts were methodical and precise, and required medical training. Of which I’m sure you’ve had more than your fair share.” She looks back at Hannibal then, and her smile is unyielding in its flinty humor. “You ought to be more careful. Your artwork is very distinctive.”

“Artwork.” Hannibal feels herself like the cave, only capable of repeating back Will’s words. “And you thought it—beautiful.”

“Yes,” Will says, leaning closer. Her hand travels down Hannibal’s arm to grasp her hand around the scalpel. “You have asked to see the truth of me. I ask for nothing less in return.” Her skin is fast and living and warm, and Hannibal can only hold still, taking in the creek-water drink of her, the terrible fates suspended in that throat. “If you are to kill me—I am already dying here,” Will says, brushing against her mouth. “But if you would have me alive—take me with you.”

Hannibal would later say, in her wife’s more incorrigibly acerbic moments, that she had thought about it, that she had drawn out the possibilities and made a calculated decision. But, in truth, in that moment, all she feels is the rush of a sudden thaw, the uncomfortable flood back of feeling in a place that had been crushed below the weight of self-imposed numbness for too long. She feels discomfort, sudden and acute, and that is enough to tug on the thread of her curiosity and unravel the calculus. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, come with me.” 

Will draws back but does not let go of her hand. She has a faint smile on her face, and the expression seems unworn on her, free as it is of irony or disdain. “It is settled, then. We should return to the house. My mother will be worried.”

“I—yes,” Hannibal says, thrown back to the Earth by practical concerns. “It has been at least an hour.”

“And put that scalpel away, for God’s sakes,” Will says, and heads to the mouth of the cave. 

“So,” Hannibal says, as they set out back towards the little house on the flat field. “Are we to be betrothed immediately upon our return?”

“It must be so,” Will says, with another smile like all the secrets she now has to keep. “I couldn’t stand another one of your visits.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Twitter @thebeespatella_ ! Come and yell about Regency Murder Wives with me so I don't have to do it by myself.


	5. Not a creature was stirring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Past Will/Molly, post-s3.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MOLLY DESERVED BETTER

Molly’s house is quiet now. 

It is strange, after a lifetime of being told she was too much, to so suddenly be told she is not enough. It is an odd feeling, and she examines it carefully on some nights, that feeling of scandal-who-wore-it-best-lose-five-pounds hollowness—so awful and mundane a thing to cart around in the wake of such supreme horror. Jack Crawford hadn’t shown her pictures but he’d come prepared with a file. Maybe he’d expected her to take a peek when he excused himself to the restroom, but she sips her coffee and looks out the window instead. She doesn’t need to see. The facts are devastation enough. 

He bids her goodbye with a nod. “Mrs. Graham,” he says. “Anything I can do.”

“You know a good divorce lawyer?”

Turns out he does. 

“Well, it looks like your best bet is divorce by publication,” the lawyer says to her two weeks later over coffee in Bangor, a pretty and quiet hour down I-95 for Molly. The lawyer is brisk and efficient in a way that Molly appreciates, black, chin-length hair clipped into a neat bob, with pearl earrings peeking out from beneath that are probably supposed to age her up, as is the perfect, sharp shape of her red lipstick. She still looks young to Molly, who is about to be on the wrong side of two marriages in so many decades. 

“We go to the court, and tell them that despite your most diligent and good faith efforts, you can’t find your husband. They’ll grant you an Order for Service by Publication, and then you publish a notice once a week for three weeks in the paper. He has 21 days to respond. Then there’s another hearing, and then you’re free.”

“Free,” Molly says, and turns her coffee cup in its saucer. There’s the stain of a spill on the edge, and she turns it away from her, running her thumb over unblemished porcelain. 

“It’ll take about three months,” the lawyer says. “If he doesn’t respond.” 

“He won’t,” Molly says, but then the fear hops into her throat, toad-like and fat. “He won’t, Miss Choi.” 

“See that he doesn’t,” Choi says. She doesn’t say _Call me Liz_ or any other such fluff, and Molly is inexplicably grateful for her professionalism where Crawford’s had made her see red, painted up and down her hallways, pressed into the meaty parts of her palm where her nails dug in. “You have my card. Make a good faith effort to contact him, and document it for the affidavit. We can probably go to court in about two weeks. Might be more, give me a call. I’ll be busy.” 

“Even over the holidays?” Molly surprises herself with the question. Good. She still has faith in some things. 

“Especially over the holidays,” Choi says, and smiles, coffee-stained teeth gleaming against her lipstick. 

Later that night, Molly’s thumb hovers over the call button. She knows Will’s phone is locked up in evidence at the FBI, that this number is as good as dead—and yet. Wally’s in the room down the hall. Safe and sound. Her house is quiet now. She takes a deep breath and hits the button, holding her own wrist in her other hand in an effort to stop the shaking as she raises the phone to her ear. It goes straight to voicemail, and the sound of his voice provokes a gasp that’s too loud for the room, and she claps a hand over her mouth. 

“You’ve reached Will Graham. I’m unavailable right now, please leave a message.”

His terseness had not been a thing she had loved about him. It had interested her, at first, but that interest had fallen away like elastic on socks, well-worn and useless at the end. It hadn’t saved him from Jack Crawford’s clutches and it hadn’t saved him from himself. 

She takes in a deep breath. It’ll leave a tinny rattle on the other end, a message no-one will hear. “Will, it’s Molly. I’m filing for divorce. Let me know if you get this.”

After that she pours herself a generous measure of the good stuff and lays back on her pillows. It’s her bed, now. Reclaiming ownership shouldn’t be so hard. Taking back what was hers had an unholy smart to it. _Good faith._ What did that mean, anyway. Choi had given her a file that had neat bundles of information in it. Molly’s life seemed to fit into files now, files just like this one, slim and manila with letterhead. 

_Contact at last known address._ This house. She could just search it top-to-bottom and let the court know she hadn’t found him. The attic needed a clean-out, anyway, and she couldn’t keep looking at his shirts hanging in the closet, his aftershave sitting on the bathroom counter. They weren’t artifacts to hope. They were just objects she didn’t know how to touch. Could you give Goodwill a runaway murderer’s clothes? They didn’t tell you on the website. There were no instructions here. There had been no instructions after Wally’s father’s death, either, but at least you could see that cancer, and try to treat it, too. 

She thinks about putting up signs, like they’d done for one of the dogs once. Have you seen this man? Call this number. But she figures the FBI is doing enough of that anyway, his face right up there next to Hannibal Lecter’s terribly good-natured mugshot. It’s not a good picture, from his FBI ID, scowling and bespectacled. It bears no relationship to the man she knew, hand-mixing dog food to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in the morning when she came down the stairs. Wasn’t that the way of photographs? Shutters pressing thumbprints into time. She’d never met Lecter but now she knew that when he’d been arrested, he’d smiled. He’d smiled on what might’ve been the worst day of his life. She can keep calling every night. 

Freddie Lounds comes nosing around for an interview and Molly shuts the door in her face. Maybe Choi could help her get an order of protection. Make it three. Molly hadn’t felt she needed protection from much before. She doesn’t want to burn off the parts of her that had touched Will. She just wants to be able to untouch, to rewind the film and have passed him by at the dog shelter, kept the thought that he was cute tucked into the pocket of her smile. Her big mouth, always getting her into trouble. But her mother always told her that any wish that required the use of a time machine was a useless one, so she ties her hair back and cleans out the attic. Puts all his clothes in a box marked To Donate. The pieces of Will Graham that haunt her will do good work elsewhere. 

There are no ghosts in this house because they are none of them dead. Over the next few days she keeps herself together, counting down the time until her next appointment with Choi. She doesn’t count down the hours to her nightly phone call with the terminus of Will’s voicemail, but finds herself at the end of the line all the same. She learns not to drink beforehand: once, on her second glass, she’d called and the rage had come up through her throat and broken through her teeth from the inside. “Call me back,” she’d hissed. “Coward.”

Afterwards, truth ringing somewhat like satisfaction in her ears, she creeps to Wally’s room like she had on the night the Red Dragon came to destroy her family. She pushes the door open and looks at the sleeping lump of her son. He’d insisted on getting rid of his cartoon sheets after they’d come home from the hospital, and she’d ruffled his hair and said, “Sure thing, kiddo.” He’s sleeping on white sheets now. She wonders if the cartoons would have moved the Dragon to pity, even for a moment. If they’d move Hannibal Lecter. If they’d move Will. Then she closes the door, soft and careful, and heads back to her room. Her room, her house. Its creaks had saved her on that night and they comfort her now. If there are things that still belong to her, after all, maybe there are places she still belongs. She’ll call Choi in the morning about those orders of protection, and next week, she’ll go to court. She’ll belong to herself again: Molly Foster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come and talk to me about how much more Molly Foster deserved, on Twitter @thebeespatella_ !


	6. Festive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, French via Google translate, recreational drug use.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a true story, plus a couple of symbolic onions, minus waking up in a Chipotle. Introducing: Hannibal on edibles.
> 
> Are the fics I'm writing even barely related to the prompts? No. Is this how I intend to go on? Yes.

He’ll just have one. Just to see what all the fuss is about, what it is that makes Will go soft-eyed and dreamy-limbed enough to lick food from Hannibal’s fingers, the way the silkscreens of his self-consciousness oubliette themselves away from behind his eyes, just for a while—the voluntary lowering of the moat-bridge. He tears open the package, and takes one gummy out to inspect. 

He puts it in his mouth and chews. It’s sweet, which is to say, it doesn’t taste like anything, and the sugar crunches under his teeth. It’s just candy, really, like all the other neon packages of small grasps at happiness at the grocery store checkout line. It lacks complexity, and Hannibal is mildly disappointed. He’d thought that perhaps there would be, at least, an interesting flavor, something to tip him off to the effects, like the taste of wine is a prelude. He has a few more, trying to discern at what point in the process it had been made with “real fruit juice.”

Well. Nothing to revel in here, a thoroughly joyless experience. He may as well start on dinner; caramelizing the onions properly for soup will take some time. He sets to peeling the onions, the paper skin coming off easily underneath his fingers, fluttering even on the gentlest exhale. Tattered protections against the elements. He places the onions on the cutting board to slice evenly, along with the garlic. The rhythm keeps him company: the satisfying nature of the give of a knife into flesh doesn’t belong to meat alone. 

Will never remembers which cutting boards are the ones for garlic and onions, and which ones are not—Hannibal is caught between fondness and irritation; which is the price of proximity, he supposes. He bruises the thyme in his hands and smiles to himself; the scent will always remind him of Bella Crawford. The stock pot goes on medium heat. He’s peeled an onion more than he’ll need; a moment of consternation for the miscalculation. It won’t go to waste; he’ll wrap it up later for safe-keeping. The butter goes in, then the herbs, then the lovely sizzle of the onions and the garlic, nestled safe in the melted butter away from burning. Perhaps he could chop up the last onion—it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more. 

He turns to the counter and sees it: the onion and its sickly luminescence. The hairs, just there, where its roots had drawn strength from the earth, not strong enough to tether them to growth and survival. Ripped from their homes. 

The knife slips from his hand to clatter on the counter, but Hannibal can only register it dully, as though it were coming from a long distance away. He can see himself in the blade, and he looks like a foreigner. He is a foreigner, in the strange land of his own body, the tips of his fingers as far away as Baltimore, as close as his own skin. The onion tumbles down with him. 

“Oh,” he says, crumbling to his knees. “Oh, _non_.” The dark of the wood floor is melting under his hands like water; unforgiving, ice-warm, like the sea. The sea! Stepping into the sea with his back to the shore, his back to the moon, plunging down in an eternal embrace. And they had lived. He spreads his palms onto the floor, wanting to feel every whorl in the wood pressed up against the whorls of his own hands, their dead uniquenesses against his own alive ones. The floor called to him as the sea must have called to Will, saying, take me, take me out of this place. Let me come home. He could never come home. He must be content with the shards of moonlight carved up in his memories—mirrors, Francis had mirrors, and they’d never met Hannibal’s wide-open eyes, but hadn’t they met Will’s? First in one way, then another. His tongue feels too big for his mouth and is that not how it has always been. Taste too big for the size of his mortality. Floating on a sea-borne cloud of his own excesses.

He drags himself along away from the light in the kitchen, into the powdery dark of the living room. The lumbering swells of his joints, the delight of his kneecaps rolling into the hard floor. Over there will be soft. Softer still. Has he always been reaching for softness? His body absent pain doesn’t feel like his body. And yet he must have been, reaching for onions and their gratuitous untethering, reaching for soup and Will’s return from town. How long had it been—he squints at the clock on the mantel—but it swims in a Dalí-like fashion and he has to lie down. If this is his subconscious, that Dalí is here is most discomfiting. 

Had he always had so many elbows? He’d certainly ingested his fair share of duplicate organs, but down to the bones? The rug is plush under his fingers, and now his face must touch it, it’s imperative, and he leans down to press his face down, only he loses his balance and lands on his back. The world is a swimming pool. He’d kept swimming, after Matthew Brown, although the exercise in being dead weight was probably equally useful. 

He blinks. There’s an onion in his hand. “ _Je suis désolé,_ ” he thinks he says, even though his voice box is sitting on the mantel with the melting clock. “I’m sorry I took you from your home.” The vegetable is silent. “Do you feel alone?” he whispers to it. It’s ghostly in the dark. The only light is that which is thrown from the kitchen doorway, and it casts a hard, bright angle over the room. “You were nurtured in the earth, and to the earth you shall return.” The umbilical cords of the roots brush across his palm, and they feel like needles. “What would you do, if you had teeth.” Teratomas could have teeth. What did aberrations have that onions didn’t? He turns to stare at the ceiling, trying to count the eye-shapes in the paint, but precision is evasive. Did teratomas mourn their own lost potential? Lost potential; it smells acrid with waste. Not quite the iron of Abigail’s blood mixing with Will’s on the kitchen floor; but not so different so as to avoid association. 

There’s the click of the door. “Hannibal, I’m home.” He shouldn’t sound like he’s underwater; not anymore. Not in this world, one of thousands. “Hannibal, something’s burning, are you—“ Suddenly the warm weight of Will at his side, the press of a warm, dry hand on his forehead, down his abdomen. The touch is like lightning striking twice; impossibly wonderful, destructive, and bright. He hears his larynx emit a groan from the mantel. 

“Will,” he says, and the word, like his tongue, too large for the confines of three-dimensional space. “Do we arm our children with enough teeth? _Abigail avait des dents._ ”

“What are you talking about, we don’t have children. What’s going on? Wait, I’m going to turn off the stove first.” 

The touch leaves. Hannibal grieves arduously. 

“Jesus, Hannibal,” Will says upon his benevolent return. “What happened to you?”

“I wanted to understand the appeal of painlessness.” 

Will’s face peers above him. Fewer eyes than the paint, easier to count, but it is easier to count your sins when they don’t count against you. 

“You wanted…Hannibal, you fucking moron. How many did you have?”

“ _Cinq_.”

“In English, please.”

He takes a moment to find it. It seems to have escaped under the couch so he reaches under there for a moment until the word comes to mind. “Five.”

“ _Five_ , are you shitting me.” Will passes a hand over his eyes. Hiding Hannibal’s sins from himself. “All right. Come here. What are you doing with that onion? Never mind. Wait.” He leaves again. But Will always returns; his boomerang love. 

“Where did you go?”

“To get a take-out menu and the gummies,” Will says. “Here, put your head in my lap. Can you do that?”

With great effort, Hannibal heaves himself onto his many elbows and deposits his head in the graceful shallow of the valley of Will’s legs. “Will,” he says. “It would not be…I shouldn’t have more. Of them.” 

For some reason, this makes Will laugh, and Hannibal gets the benefit of watching the upturned castle of his jaw turning up; geese flying north. But then Will looks back down at him, and puts a hand on his face; pushes a thumb into Hannibal’s mouth. “You’d take more if I gave them to you.”

Hannibal has no answer except to close his eyes. They’ll taste of nothing; not like the salt-bright feel of Will’s finger in his mouth; the glorious, slipping taste of life under his tongue. Perhaps he can be sated. Perhaps there is enough. Enough for hunger, enough for memory; enough for time’s teardrop welling in the wake of his breath. The thumb withdraws. 

“They’re not for you,” Will says. “If you decided celebrate early, I can too. And don’t say anything about the take-out, you’ll thank me for it later.”

“I’m sure I will,” Hannibal says, and lets the onion roll to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Abigail avait des dents._ \- Abigail had teeth. 
> 
> I'm on Twitter @thebeespatella_, come tell me you forgive me for this bizarre foray into the THC wilds


	7. Warm Bath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, Hannibal Rising references, with some depictions of vomiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired by Knives Out, which is a great movie, and re-reading Hannibal Rising instead of going to sleep. Do NOT talk to me about that book, neither of us have the time or energy for my rants.

He’d made it to the bathroom that first time. He can afford to do it now. Moving quickly down the hallway, fists clenched, nails burrowing into his palms—

The first time: a mother, well-heeled and tired-eyed in front of the vending machines, shoulders sagging underneath her good cardigan. It was always cold in the police station. “They—they hurt her, Officer Graham,” she said. 

They both gazed in the direction of the pale green interview room door. Her child sat beyond it, staring at the dull metal surface of the table as though she could parse something beyond her own warped reflection as she recited what was done to her. Will caught in her recitation the high shrill wreckage of confusion and excused himself to get her a soda, and the mother had come with. The father was not there. The can of Diet Coke remained unpopped in the mother’s limp hand under the adrenal fluorescent light. Memory probably provides some saturation and he remembers the colors vivid. “They _hurt_ her. She’s slow, but she’s a good girl; she’s slow, but she didn’t deserve this.”

It was the _but_ that really did him in. “Of course. Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, confusion still tinnitus-bright in his ears and walked as evenly as he could bear to the men’s room down the corridor, barely making it to the stall before he dropped to his knees and threw up.

What they’d called ‘intelligent psychopaths’ (a phrase Will still keeps handy for himself, if only for the entertainment value) in some ways, were easier. Violence beyond violence. Even Dolarhyde had been reaching for the moon. He’d rejected words like “beautiful” outside of his own antlered mind but his body also rejected things that were not beautiful; the familiar clumsy itch of inelegant cruelty. The FBI bathroom; something too desperate and needy in Hobbs. He’d given a lecture, once: “Don’t get caught up in mystique. Nothing mysterious about bodies. Look at the evidence. Remember the victims. There is no glory for them“—

Hannibal caught him in the bath, opening the door. “Will,” he said, and he turned, in the reflected white of the tile-light, to see where Will had propped himself up against the curve of the generous bathtub, wine glass clouded over with steam. 

“Want to hop in?”

And then Hannibal’s face shuttered itself to him, replaced instead with a carefully articulated impression of civility. “Excuse me,” he said, and shut the door—gently—behind him. 

Will ruminated it over the last half-glass of wine, then dragged himself up out of the water with a sigh. It had been a good soak, while it lasted, but now he needed to attend to Hannibal’s vacant politesse. It happened, sometimes, at odd moments—had happened too, before, but Will had passed those off with retrospective surety as moments of murderous contemplation. Now that they were here, together—what impulses were left to withhold from him? The absconded knowledge rankled, sticky-fingered along his skin like dogs pawing at his shins to be fed. _Hush_ , he wanted to say. You’ll get your food. You have better manners than that. 

But, of course, he doesn’t, so he toweled off the water and the dog-feeling and got dressed, bringing the empty wine glass with him.

Now, hurrying down the hallway—

He found Hannibal in the study. It was dark except for the lambent apricot from the street coming in banded through the three-quarters closed blinds, the occasional long drawl of headlights from a passing car. He left it as it was and sat next to Hannibal on the couch. 

“Too suburbia for you?” he asked, nudging Hannibal’s knee with his own. “Wine and a bubble bath?”

“I apologize if I was brusque with you, Will,” Hannibal said, and his voice had that run-over quality, like he was pulling his intestines up out with it, hand over fist. Will could help him with that. 

“I wasn’t upset. I finished my wine.” Will offered up the token of the wait, that he hadn’t immediately run raw-hide, jaw snapping, after the evidence of Hannibal’s hiding. Given him the courtesy of time enough to put himself away, if he wanted. 

Hannibal turned to look at him, and Will knew the game was up. He shrugged, one-shouldered. It had been a meager token, in any case, a gesture built for the customs implied by the polite screen on Hannibal’s face. Not for the high-arched cathedral ceilings of the altars and offering plates they had for each other. 

“Finishing your wine has not always been a good omen.”

Will let himself smile. “One time,” he said. “One time, and we were at altitude.”

“Once?”

“The other times were whiskey,” he said. That’s fine, he could let the habituated sense of conventional embarrassment unspool at Hannibal’s pull, an easy enough offering to make. The wine glass flashed in his hands as he put it on the side table. He stared directly ahead at the dark mouth of the fireplace. “I sat with Jack, once,” he said. “After I found out about his wife’s cancer. I sat down and said I wasn’t leaving ’til he was ready to talk. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, ‘I don’t know that I ever will be.’ And I left him alone after that.”

“Will you give me the same courtesy you gave Uncle Jack?”

“No,” Will said, looking down at the empty cup of his own hands clasped around each other. “No, I’m afraid I can’t.” 

“I see.”

“You said once that we were conjoined.” Offerings are just bait for gods, and he knows how to fish. An offering and a dare: two things gods can’t resist. 

“Humans are natural storytellers,” Hannibal said. “The past can often have the lurid attraction of order; a semblance of chaptered structure.”

“If-then,” Will agreed. “The creases in the paper smoothed out so we can read the writing.”

“Time does occasionally seek out nature’s rhythms. Evolution is a reaction to the past.”

“For the things that survive. Fate has its hands full of the ones that don’t.” Will settled back into the armrest, the better to look at Hannibal. The motion chimed with the old memory of sitting across from him in the vast red of his office. Recollection boomed. “You also once told me that I had to adapt my behavior to avoid feeling the obstacle of anticipated regret.”

Hannibal tilted his head into the stripes of light. “And? Have you adapted?”

“I’ve learned how to better cushion my falls. So that anticipation no longer bears such a keen sting.” Will leaned forward, the sympathetic pull toward other human bodies that the hind-brain can’t resist. He still has his. Perhaps Hannibal doesn’t. He reached out a fatal hand to rest two fingers on the pulse-line of Hannibal’s birdcall wrist. “Hannibal,” he said. “Tell me a story.”

Hannibal drew in breath to speak—

So. In the hallway now, cutting crescents into his hands. The ornate little brass handle on the door. The sour urgency of nausea leaping in his stomach, the flood of saliva in his mouth, the sweat gathering pointillism thick along the back of his neck, across his forehead, in his clenched palms, with the effort of keeping it in. He turns the handle and rushes in, collapsing and, barely getting the lid up in time, he throws up. It’s acid and copious. Hannibal’s voice of his gut, wringing out every last drop of bile—wracking his body in a convulsive shudder. The animal retch in his throat, tile unforgiving against his knees.

A hand dropping into his hair to push it off his forehead. Peeling it back to reveal the scar. He feels the backhand hinge-snap of his own anger. “Don’t—“ he coughs and it drips thick and ropy from his mouth. The soft curl of Hannibal’s fingers in his hair is a parody of the roiling clutch of his own hands on the toilet. “You don’t need to—“

“I brought you water.” 

“I don’t want—“

The lightheaded afterbirth. His body is shivering; the sweat takes on a clammy sheen. He spits out the rest of it and lets the lid slap shut to rest his head on the surface. Hannibal pushes the water into his hand; half slops down on his shirt as he raises it up to drink. “Did you need to see it on somebody else?” His voice is scraped raw by his own insides. “Did you need to see that it was real?”

“It flickers in and out of my perception,” the voice says above him. Still tender-fingered in his hair, and Will closes his eyes. All he can see is the bathtub. Give those old bones a rest. Copper and flowers. Boiled flesh and milk teeth. 

“I’m sorry,” Will says.

“I do not begrudge you your certainty, Will,” Hannibal says, sliding down to sit, leaning back on the cabinet. “Memory has a quantum quality. Every time we remember, we are just recalling the last instance of remembrance.”

Will opens his eyes. He’s covered in scars, piecemeal. He should have learned to recognize their weathered-over look. “Dogs,” he says, “lick their own wounds.”

“Their saliva has enzymes with anti-bacterial properties.”

“They can’t fix breaks.”

“Am I broken, Will?”

Will snorts and it hurts his chest. “Not in the least.” He pushes himself up off the toilet and rambles his body over to arrange his head in Hannibal’s lap. He can give this, at least, at last. The overhead light bleeds behind his eyelids. “Did you get ‘em good?”

“Oh, I got them,” Hannibal says, and Will can hear the light-bend of a smile in his voice. “Cheeks and morels. A hearty meal in the forest of my childhood. Perhaps I could prepare it for you sometime.”

“I’d like that,” Will says, and keeps his eyes closed against the light.


	8. Sentiment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, slice of life, Overuse and Abuse of Dante's Inferno.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by "Hell", by Billy Collins.

They’re lying on their backs in a mattress store. Will doesn’t know how he’d thought that rich people acquired their mattresses—certainly not on an unkempt swamp-damp roadside with their dad hollering “Put your back into it, Willy“ as the truck rumbles with discontent idling—but there is a pat satisfaction in how absolutely fucking annoying it is to get up, lay down, be shown a firmer one, a softer one, memory foam, latex, toppers, android ones that can change their tensions, can be whatever you want, baby. 

The idea of memory foam is disconcerting, he thinks, lying there too horizontal to be comfortable on the plastic sheeting. What would the bed remember, anyway—probably nothing that won’t come back to Will himself in hot bright moments, standing in the market, crossing the street, the warm breadth of Hannibal’s hand suddenly at the small of his back. Remember? Remember? It’ll remember his unconsciousness, he supposes. Things that he can’t because of the rhythms of the human body. It’ll remember Hannibal’s unconsciousness, too, and maybe that’s what really irks about the whole situation. Those half-lit, exhale moments are for him alone, turning over in the blotted darkness to glimpse, through the drunk blur of sleep, the scar on Hannibal’s cheekbone, the solemn draw of his mouth in rest, the tensing of the wrinkles carved next to his eyes as REM flutters underneath. He won’t share that with the goddamn mattress. Get your own memories, he wants to say.

He nudges Hannibal’s shoulder as they both stare up into the lime-limned fluorescent light and the charmless concrete ceiling. “What ring, do you think?”

Hannibal turns his head in question. 

“Below the suicides, and their skin-draped trees? Definitely not above it, based on the lighting situation alone.”

“What was their crime?”

“Betrayal. Stabbing their husbands in the back, saying it’ll only take 20 minutes when it’s been at least 45. Fated to lie on their backs forever on sticky plastic, being sold snake oil sleep-miracle mattresses in a too-warm big box store, without the benefits of sleep. Or sex.”

What’s nice about Hannibal insisting on exclusively reading poetry from before the 15th century is that once Will’s up on the references, it’s pretty easy to jostle underneath their hallowed agéd structures and try writing poetry for the 21st; that is to say: jokes. Making Hannibal laugh contains the novel sensation of laid-back slyness, a low-stakes game against Hannibal’s dignified poker face. He doesn’t always succeed, but when he does—a rush, something with the same sprint as relief but with an oven-warmed quality, low and satisfying in the belly. Hannibal laughs now, pressing his lips against the startled bark of it. “All right,” he says. “Shall we go?”

The eager salesman hovers in his sweat-stained short-sleeved button-up, wringing his hands together. “So? Have we made a decision?” he says, as they wrestle themselves up against the sharp crinkle of the plastic. 

“Yes,” Will says, making it to his feet. “We have.”

“And what might that be, sir? I have to say, the Sleep Number—“

“We’re leaving, that’s the decision.” And, on Hannibal’s tightening grip on his elbow: “Thank you so much for your help.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. “Such an array of choices. Terribly difficult.” 

“What I really want,” Will says, as they navigate the labyrinth of android mattresses towards the door, “is our own mattress. Fifteen years from now, lumpy and old and uncomfortable.”

“Do you insist on the discomfort?”

“I think I might have to.” 

Hannibal’s hand is settled on the small of his back; automatic, unconscious. And they walk out of the store, tussling briefly with a knot of holiday shoppers, until they’re out of the mall, into the cold open air.


	9. Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, self-indulgent angst and florid language use on the part of the author.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got frustrated trying to be understood today. Foolish, really: but it did mean I had to write and drain the festering abscess of my own frustration. Thankfully Will Graham was here to be the whipping boy.

He followed words to their natural end; that is to say, he didn’t know where he was going until he got there. Articulating a feeling was the only way it got felt, breathing air into _rage_ , the luxuriant a, the soft g, fading slowly into itself until the word and the feeling were melded perfectly, footprints in cement. A perfect text-to-speech machine: sentences sprung to him fully-formed, Athena out of the head of her father, although whether they were wise or not—not a lack of impulse control, necessarily. Just a desire to see things made real. 

Images, gestures, intonation—what were they to the hard solid shape of words in the mouth? Reading, with its attendant glorious telepathy, was the safest, safer than reading other people’s words directly out of their mouths and hearing every “yeah”, “okay”, “like”, and “so”: but no wasted breaths on the page. The waste of words nettled him as much as their misuse, nettled in a way that he would later castigate himself for for being elitist, stuck-up, full of himself. Trying to find the exact word, the shade of gray that would capture the bewildered shame of caring too much. And then he would reclaim every inch of the shore of his own rugged peninsula against it, brash in the war of attrition against the quiet unbelonging in a world that didn’t care very much when he got it right but seemed to care immensely when he didn’t. 

It’s the truth in the moment it’s said; that’s what was so hard to convey to other people, he was only telling the immensely mutable truth. And truth and belief—entirely separable from each other. You don’t have to believe in the truth, and the truth doesn’t have to believe in you, either, you can have a quietly goading relationship of stripping down until there are only white gleaming bones, or you can sit comfortably kitty-corner acknowledging that you’ll flit in and out of each other, phasing through in ghostly possession. The truth gripped him in odd moments. It released him in even odder ones. 

But in the end. This is how it is. Him and the trailing pack behind, nipping at his heels with insistence at precision and accuracy. Pack hunters indeed, hounding down the bigger prey of his emotions together. In the beginning, there was the Word. Everything that followed after that? Also words. Rage could stay tucked behind his teeth. Just a word; everything to him. And yet shapeless until his tongue curled back: r. 

It was easy to talk to Hannibal, until it was difficult. When the truth seemed to matter it was easy. When the truth seemed to be understood, it was hard. No is a direction. So is maybe. The gelatinized mirror-glaze, gazing up an inadequate depiction. Your reflection, even, is backwards. He can say things just fine, figuring out what the right thing to say is impossible, a cruel game other people play with each other. 

He wants to ask Hannibal to tell him what to say, now. Tell me what you want to hear. I’ll say it, and it’ll be the truth. It would be the truth. Being given direction is just illuminating a long corridor, doors opening up to the possibilities. But having to flick the switch himself: so much—so much _work_. So much fucking work to just end up in the wrong wing of the house anyway. (Hannibal seems unaffected by the swearing. Will had thought as much, but it’s so hard to tell, so hard to tell, always). 

Turns out even the love of your life. The love of their life. Their history. Those things are not enough to bridge moments of casual misunderstanding; jokes dropped between them like plates, delivering on promises that were never desired. Quotidian mishaps, but understandable is not the same as acceptable, and he carves himself down into the lump of doubt until he’s huddling against the gale on the shore of misgiving. Now Will is left with his disconsolate words, their sounds, the reflexive dance of his tongue on a bit in a bridle with no rider but himself. He’s exhausted the range of the poets’ generous lending; paying library fines with cash he doesn’t have. He reaches out and tries to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me, help me understand. Any port in a storm.

“I love you,” he says. 

Wrong again.


	10. Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will/Hannibal, post-s3, some fluff, light angst, social overstimulation, blinis.

“My love,” Hannibal says. “I’m terribly sorry.”

Will clutches the stem of his champagne flute and narrows his eyes. It’s a little late for that, he thinks. Hannibal, despite being a flagrant serial murderer on the run from the F.B.I., had insisted on holding a “little gathering for friends and neighbors” on the winter solstice, like an asshole, and Will had only conceded when it became clear that his opinion was no longer relevant and there were reams of puff pastry in the fridge. 

“This is how Alana found you, last time,” he’d said, squinting at the label on a package on the table. “Fucking—caviar. That’s how she found you.”

“It’s only a _little_ caviar,” Hannibal said, and continued to chop leeks.

So standing here, now, fingers too tight on the crystal and that interminable itch at the back of his neck—Will can only press his lips together and glare at Hannibal. “What’re you sorry for?” Nobody is really looking at them, right now, but that’s cold relief against the rising tidal wave of noise, an ocean of ants, crawling up with thousands of little legs to settle around his neck like a nervous writhing collar. The broken shards of chatter, chandelier falling to the floor in bits and pieces. There are no patterns, and he can feel the fingernails of asyncompe scrabbling at the insides of his eyes. 

“I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t had time to assemble the blinis. Would you mind…?”

“Fine. Fine, I’ll do it.”

“They’re on the counter, along with the decorations. The crème fraîche and caviar should be in the fridge. A small scoop of each should do it.”

“ _Participate_ , my ass, Bedelia,” he mutters to himself but heads to the kitchen anyway. 

He closes the heavy sliding door to the kitchen behind him, and leans back against it for a moment, closing his eyes. The full-body euphoria of the quiet. He can still hear the voices behind the door but it’s been muted to a dull ripple of sound, and he doesn’t have to feel them under his skin for now. 

The blinis are on the counter, already arranged in concentric circles on a large white platter, and there’s a tray of dill, already clipped to tiny identical sprigs on a tray next to it. “Asshole,” he says to nobody in particular, and it’s a strange sunburned warmth to look at those little leaves laid out carefully, probably measured to the millimeter. 

It’s surprisingly difficult to get a blob of crème fraîche and a blob of caviar to look elegant, and he has to eat his first attempt, a brutal road accident of smears. It’s delicious, of course, the heady rush of pure indulgence that Hannibal is so adept at cultivating, a gilded moment of pure embodiment. The lush of the crème fraîche, the salty burst of caviar, the cloudy toothiness to the pancake. Will finds his eyes closed and wrenches them open. 

He needs smaller spoons. He rearranges the blinis to hide the bald spot on the platter, then starts with careful spoonfuls over each one. He ends up having to push his finger in there to get the cream out of the shell of the spoon, but finds he really doesn’t care that much about food safety. After all, his finger isn’t the only skin they’ll be tasting tonight. He finds himself in rhythm, a spoonful of crème fraîche, draping the caviar over it, a sprig of dill tucked carefully into the side, like a feather in a cap, or what Will imagines feathers look like in caps. Our language ties us to the past in ways that are tangled and brambled beyond repair. 

He’s on the third-to-last one when it occurs to him that it is blissfully quiet in here, that the task at hand could be described as _soothingly repetitive_ , and that he feels, well, comfortable. His fingers are starting to prune in the warm bath of his comfort and the consciousness returns with a vague prickle. The blinis had been set out and the sprigs perfectly cut. Hannibal always stumbles in his manipulations these days because they’re too precise. It’s a courtesy, Will supposes, to let him know that they’re present, at least. 

The door slides open, and the noise floods back in. “Will? How are they coming along?”

“Come look.” The prickle shivers up his arms, but he can’t help the breath that escapes him when Hannibal closes the door behind himself. They stand together looking at the roe in their new deathbeds. 

“There are twenty-nine,” Hannibal says. “There were thirty.”

“I ate one.”

“Was it good?”

“You don’t have to manage me,” Will snaps. 

“I don’t,” Hannibal, leaning in to inspect the dill placement or something else similarly revoltingly granular that he’ll correct, but only when Will’s back is turned, so he won’t, what—hurt him? 

“You don’t manage me? You just _happened_ to forget the blinis.” 

“You overestimate me,” Hannibal says, and stands up to tilt his hip against the counter. He leans more, now. “It is entirely possible for me to have run out of time.” But he’s smiling in that half-lipped way, like he’s pushing down a laugh, like they’re both in on the joke. 

Will feels his nails nip into his palms and he uncurls his fingers to splay against the surface of the counter. It’s cool and perfectly flat under his hands, a reassuring inhumanness. “I’m sorry I’m such a liability.”

The plate is lifted off the counter. “Take all the time you need,” Hannibal says, taking it to the door. Another rush of noise and then the quiet again. 

He closes his eyes against the sight of his own hands on the countertop, and takes a ragged breath in. He thinks about staying in here until the guests have gone with only the pilfered blini to keep him company. He could do it. There had been a time in elementary school when the nurse had sent him home with a note for his dad inquiring after his dietary habits because he spent so much time in the bathroom. He hadn’t had to show it to his dad because he’d never been home, crumpling it at the bottom of his backpack, exhausted with trying to find a less conspicuous place to be alone. 

But worse—the words he’d lanced at Hannibal just now in their careful kitchen, becoming true: Hannibal would make excuses, and the guests would coo and ask after his health and he’d have nothing but his own shame as a refuge in that. Staring at the great mountain pass of Hannibal’s sleeping back in the dark shelter of their room, wide awake with his own futility. 

So he assembles parts of himself long unused in Hannibal’s company. Since before that—it had been so long since he had made any sort of effort at all. There’s a place outside of himself that belongs to television commercial aspirations, and he hauls it over himself now, and it slides over his face. Two and a half hours. He can do two and a half hours, and then come hell or high water, he is kicking them all out the door. The champagne glass is light in his fingers as he comes to the door and heads into the fray. 

Later: plates in the dishwasher; the ones to be spared such barbaric treatment in the sink; glasses in the dish rack; not a blini left in sight; tittering compliments accepted and returned. Sticky counters given a cursory wipe-down, food wrapped and put away; the rest would all hold til morning. The tingle of a little too much champagne in his limbs, but then, there had been an extra fifteen minutes in punting the last straggler out. Will is halfway to the land of sleep, but he pauses on the bridge to ask, “Did you really run out of time?”

Hannibal only presses closer to wrap an arm around him. “No, I didn’t.”

“You’re an asshole,” Will informs him, then he crosses the bridge, held close in the care-warm clutch of Hannibal’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they are unbeaaaaarable come find me at @thebeespatella_ on twitter if you want to hear me complain about it


End file.
